The Rev. John Clifford Rankin is President of the Theological Education Institute (TEI), International (teii.org), which he founded in 1986, following and during his years in pastoral and pro-life ministry.

John is a graduate of South Kent School, Denison University (B.A. History), Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (M.Div.) and Harvard Divinity School (Th.M. Ethics and Public Policy); and is pursuing an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in A Theology of Political Freedom at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies.

His books include The Six Pillars of Biblical Power, The Six Pillars of Honest Politics, Jesus, in the Face of His Enemies, Genesis and the Power of True Assumptions, The Real Muḥammad: In the Eyes of Ibn Isḥāq, The Judas Economy, Changing the Language of the Abortion Debate, and Moses and Jesus in the face of Muhammad. They are described at teibooks.com.

John grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut, and presently lives in Simsbury. John’s father, Dr. Emmet Clair Rankin (1918-2010), was a 1940 graduate of the University of Nebraskan (Lincoln), majoring in zoology, with focus also on English, Latin and German. He was a 1943 graduate of the University of Nebraska Medical School (Omaha) [completing his degree in 3 1/2 years with no vacations during the war effort], then served as a Navy physician in the Pacific prior to the end of World War II, coming from a long line of Presbyterian ministers, including leading abolitionists. This traces back to the Rev. William Rankin who fled Scotland to Ireland after the 1688 English Revolution, having lost four of his five sons in the war, and emigrated to Delaware in 1721, one year before his death, with his remaining son, the Rev. Adam Rankin (born 1684), along with Adam’s five sons. One of Adam’s grandsons is the Rev. John Thomas Rankin (1793-1886), “the manager of the Underground Railroad.” Dr. Rankin’s father, Elwood Clair Rankin (1884-1956), descends from another of Adam’s sons, and was a musical genius who was not allowed in his era to study or play music; his sister Mary Rankin (1898-1986) taught Latin and Music at the University of Nebraska. Beyond his Scottish roots, John’s lineage is also Welsh, Swedish, and also with some Hungarian Jewish ancestry. John’s father started the Connecticut Blood Bank in 1950, and became chief of hematology at the Hartford Hospital. John’s mother, Anne Bridges McKee Rankin (1922-1976), was a 1943 graduate of the University of Colorado, and the daughter of an Iowa native, Dr. William Clifford McKee (1884-1939), who graduated Pomona College, then in 1913 graduated Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore. There he met his wife, Marybelle Rainey McKee (1888-1982), who was in the family line of Sir Francis Scott Key. From there they moved to Los Angeles where Dr. McKee became an ob-gyn at the Good Samaritan Hospital. John’s father and mother met at the Naval Officer’s Club in 1944 in Los Angeles, and married in 1946 after his Navy service was complete. He was on Okinawa on August 6, 1945, the day of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, was preparing to be a field surgeon in the planned invasion of Japan, but instead ran a hospital on Saipan. Thus John’s grandfathers, both born in 1884, were born before the death the Rev. John T. Rankin in 1886, he who is the grandson of the Rev. Adam Rankin, born in 1684. John has three sisters (one deceased) and one brother.

John’s father left a local Presbyterian church that he found “Insufferably judgmental” (late 1940s), then left a Congregational Church (late 1950s) because the minister was caught in adultery, and thus Dr. Rankin migrated to the Unitarian-Universalist church where the minister “was intelligent and worth listening to, and faithful to his wife.” John then became subject to agnostic Sunday School teachers, especially in the third grade, but also became immediately skeptical of their skepticisms. His father was unaware of this, and at age 90 when John read to him (he was nearly blind), from one of his books, about his third grade Sunday School teacher, his father laughed deeply, and quoted this clause in Latin, saying, “John, you are my son — we are both skeptics of skepticism.” Thus, from age 6, John grew up in this agnostic Unitarian context within the heaviest Jewish population in New England, one block from its largest synagogue, Beth Israel, in an era deeply colored still by the shadow of the Holocaust, and where a good half of the friends of John’s parents were Jewish. From his earliest years, John was amazed by the universe and life, encountered the living presence of the one true Creator in an Episcopal boarding school, and converted to a biblical and evangelical faith as a 14-year old in 1967, being a disciple of Jesus ever since.

John and his wife, Nancy Jean Gordon Rankin, met at Denison during her freshman year in 1973, they were married on August 6, 1977, have four grown children and six (living) grandchildren. Nancy’s father, the Rev. Robert Grenfel Gordon (1914-1995), a graduate of Denison and Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, with Ph.D. work at Union Theological Seminary before he lost much of his hearing, was an American Baptist minister, and the chaplain aboard the flagship U.S.S. Augusta on D-Day, June 6, 1944, coming from a line of Baptist ministers. Nancy’s mother, Janet McCord Gordon (1918-2000), comes from a long Presbyterian stock, and met Nancy’s father before she graduated Rochester University, and while becoming a mother of four, served as a pastor’s wife, and also taught High School Latin and French. John is of a plurality Scottish descent (the Rankin clan is part of the Highlander MacLean clan of Argyll and the Inner Hebrides), as well as Welsh, English and Swedish. Nancy is virtually Scottish, of the large Gordon clan of Northeastern Scotland. But they never thought much about their mutual Scottish heritage until years after they were married. And as it turns out, they are also quite distant cousins, racing back, as so many do, to William I of Normandy.

John is also an alumnus, from his high school and college years, of the Fellowship of Christians in University and Schools (FOCUS), being baptized as a teenager by its founder, the Rev. Dr. Peter C. Moore; of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF); also being ordained through the Vineyard Christian Fellowship; and his home church since 1992 is Covenant Presbyterian in Simsbury, CT.

TEI International Leadership School

The foundation of Genesis 1-3 interprets the whole Bible, all church history, all political history and all world religions; indeed, it is the foundation for the most rigorous liberal arts education possible. Click here for the textbook: Genesis and the Power of True Assumptions (Volume 2), sixth book listed. Also see an outline of the seven classes taught in the TEI International Leadership School.